Talk:International Herald Tribune

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Wasted Time R in topic Inaccurate Passage

Move discussion in progress

edit

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:The New York Times International Edition which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 02:16, 1 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

edit

Could a senior editor please put a stop to the sabotage of the International Herald Tribune Page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:CB08:13B:CC00:FC29:386D:7E22:D8C1 (talk) 07:21, 28 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

There's no paid editing and no sabotage going on here. As User:Cliffb pointed out, there is nothing in the citations we have so far that supports a sale of the IHT archives to the Gale company; they may just be licensing access to the archives. I did some looking and all that I could find was that a) as of 2009, the New York Times was trying to integrate some IHT archives into their own archives, but were having technical trouble in doing so; and b) in 2017, Gale announced that it would be hosting the full archives, while the NYT began showing a small set of retrospective IHT articles only. What happened between a and b I do not know. If you have some sources that indicate a sale, please present them and the article can be changed to reflect that. Wasted Time R (talk) 10:57, 28 March 2022 (UTC)Reply

Inaccurate Passage

edit

Hi, I was an editor in the Business/Finance section of the International Herald Tribune from the late 1980s until 1997 and then the New York correspondent until 2002. This passage in the main article is incorrect, even if the work referenced by footnote 10 says otherwise:

Notably, every edition had the exact same editorial content, and even most of the advertising ran across all areas (by comparison, the international edition of the Wall Street Journal was heavily regionalized).[10]

In fact, we had three separate editions most days, one that closed at 10 p.m. Paris time, a second at midnight, and final that we called the replate at about 12:15 a.m. The different editions reflected time zones and delivery issues, which had the effect of making the first one the most prevalent in Asia and (for a different reason) the Americas, while major European cities usually got the second edition but outlying areas got the first. The replate was strictly for Paris, and we occasionally didn't do that one.

The different editions were denoted by asterisks in the folio under the front-page flag. One star was the first, two stars the second, two stars followed by an "R" the replate, and, if memory serves, very rarely three stars when we published an extra edition (like on a U.S. presidential election night).

We did significant editing for the second edition from the first, including updates and fixes on existing articles and the addition of news that broke after 9 p.m. or so. The replate had fewer changes, mainly on the front page, but we could alter one or two other pages if there were compelling reasons to do so.

Although the editing didn't differ by region, it had the effect of giving later and usually more accurate news to Europe, and lest you think the changes were essentially just updates and minor fixes, I can tell you that the saddest thing an IHT editor had to do -- and we had to do it pretty often -- was to replace a carefully crafted story we created from multiple wire-service reports with a filing late in our day from the New York Times or the Washington Post. This was important to the reporters because their sources outside the United States would usually see the articles in the Trib on the day of publication but only days or weeks later in our parent newspapers.

If you're wondering, the Americas got the early edition because we had a relatively small press run that was distributed over an enormous area, and to get the paper into readers' hands on the day of publication, the two-hour head start was crucial. For a short time we circulated the Trib at selected hotels in New York the night before the publication date -- it was printed by 6 p.m., so that was doable.

I'm not going to change the text of the entry because this is my own original reporting, so to speak, but if somebody can get access to the source material, I think you may find that the original quote doesn't go as far as the current Wikipedia article text regarding the uniformity in different markets.

2603:7000:3100:1A4C:CD7F:A6E8:F2E9:7C50 (talk) 00:30, 23 June 2022 (UTC)Mitchell MartinReply

What you are saying is actually consistent with what the footnote 10 source says. I've revised the article to indicate both aspects. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:52, 25 June 2022 (UTC)Reply